Go! Go! Go! was the second album I produced around 1991 through the now defunct mp3.com. The songs were presented in their proprietary D.A.M. (Digital Automatic Music) format, and distributed widely to a network of jukeboxes which had built-in CD burners. You could pick tunes from different artists and make your own CD on the fly, it was pretty cool stuff.

The artwork for the album was done in Bryce 3D (a program now owned by DAZ) then photoshopped, if I recall. It was an image of two twisted marble staircases and some glass spheres or some such thing in the water, and inside the CD liner was a similar twisted marble staircase in the ocean with a golden ufo sending down a blue beam into the water. Yeah very late 90s type of raver images for sure. I couldn’t seem to find the pictures on my hard drive backups yet (shrugs!)

Most of the songs were done in the late 1980s and early 1990s when I was fresh in or out of highschool, using OctaMED SoundStudio on the Commodore Amiga computer, though some of them were earlier Aegis Sonix or SoundTracker tunes (also done on the Amiga). It’s a wild mix of underground mod scene, back in the day when tracker programs were king in the music making world. My, we have come a long way. I am glad to see that MED SoundStudio is still around today! These are all tracks I created and submitted for videogames, some euro techno, jpop style, or classify most of these tunes as instrumental electronica or techno of some sort, though your mileage will vary, ugh, some sound horrible to me now! We have breakbeat and downtempo and all sorts of ideas going here. I can’t say I make anything like these songs today, my music has changed much since then. Gosh enough babble, lets get to the tunes! 🙂

There’s a backstory to this, I was boinking a friends wife and used this song title to nonchalantly tell him so. The drums used in this track were taken from a program called Dynamic Drums, in fact, I did most of the song in Dynamic Drums, even though it was a drum program I used it to make.. songs.

Thus named because the module had a whopping 55 samples. It didn’t really make for a good tune, I just did it as a proof of concept. Once you get past the initial sample bits, it begins to be a better constructed tune, each sample being added after each block, which is a common theme for tracker modules to do.

This was a Sonix tune. The title is a reference to numerology. It builds upon itself over a series of blocks, much like tracker tunes, though Sonix was more of a notation program and hard to do tracker-style step editing, it could be done if you worked at it enough (and I did..)

This tune was one of the videogame scores for an Erb game. In the first Erb game, he escaped to a place of nice dreams, and in the second game, he was having a bad dream. In the third game, he set out to seek revenge on the dream makers, hence Erb’s Revenge. All the games were made by DigitalStuff/Captron Entertainment and I think released through Capcom, though I can’t recall. This particular tune was in-level music for a jumping sequence (think of Mario, or other platform jumpers).

Another song from Erb’s Bad Dream game. This was a bonus level music used in the game, where crazy shit fell on him and he had to catch it. Erb wasn’t exactly a symmetrical looking guy, which made it funny to watch him to this kind of stuff.

This was a tracker module, think of a guy out in the bush, faced with lions and weather and what not, but he still takes time to bang on the bongos. A crazy mod tracker tune from days gone by. There are some reverse samples in here and I think the lion may be similar to the one used by MGM though .. public domain (standard disclaimer applies here).

Another Korg 01/M1 sample tune, you can hear that signature universe sound the keyboard had. This one sounds somewhat like the intro to Darkman (the movie, comic, etc.) from which the tune was inspired.

This was one of the first OctaMED SoundStudio songs I did after the major version change from OctaMED to newer SoundStudio versions, I was pretty happy at the time and Semjase helped me write the track. There’s another version out there that has some nice trio guitar licks and crunches in it, unfortunately this one (the one that made it to the CD) didn’t have that in it.

The original song (believe it or not) had Ren & Stimpy samples in it, then had some sort of girls moaning which gave it a decidedly R rating, well, this one doesn’t have either Ren, Stimpy, or moaning girls in it, and said parts of the song were exchanged with some silly drum smashes, so it is called the G-Rated Drum Mix, it’s the one that ended up on the album. I like the sorta island steeldrum/marimba thing going. These are Korg 01/M1 samples of some sort. A happy island party song.

This was another tune from a videogame soundtrack, I think it was the loading screen, though I can’t quite remember what game it was. Track zero is the loading music, heh, that’s all I remember! It’s a nice little track though, I think it just uses 2 samples which were both very low in file size, hence it fit in the needed tiny space of a loader routine! It was done in OctaMED / MED SoundStudio on the Amiga.

This was an early attempt at taking real big arse guitar strum samples and putting them into a tracker sort of song. I did it for a Spanish show I was working on at the time, though they of course didn’t end up using it (LOL.. sad..) it did however make it to the album.

Binx, what a hottie she was, I wonder what ever happen to her. Nice skinny blonde girl with a attitude of sorts, anyway, we made these songs for my Castle BBS together and coded some intro demos on the Amiga to promote the BBS (whew that was the day! BBS intros! ha!) ok I am dating myself now. Anyway, this was iteration #8 in a long series of demo music, probably not the best, but it had most the elements of the earlier versions, pretty crazy stuff. It was done in Aegis Sonix then ported to a tracker program, most likely ending up on OctaMED/MED SoundStudio, definitely an Amiga version. There’s all kinda 8bit crude lo-fi samples in here. MoDem sounds, TMNT sounds, my mom is even in there somewhere, ah for the high school days with a tape recorder, making samples for the computer. I used PerfectSound to import the sounds, Hah! Pretty nutty, as most tracker tunes were.

A “guru” was the name of an error message when the Amiga crashed it would pop up a red box that said Guru Meditation # with some sort of code describing what the error was and where in memory it could be found. Another feature of the guru was that your power LED would blink. You could in fact trigger the power LED to blink, thus fooling your friends that an error was occuring (hehe) and it also acted on the audio filter, so you could mess with it to make some nifty filter effects on tracker programs, which is what I did.. You can’t see it in this song of course, but that’s what was going on. Another tracker module for your listening pleasure.

I did this song when a new version of OctaMED or some tracker software came out, just for yuks I wanted to see it working. I made a song rather quickly (most of these tunes took less than 10 minutes to create, really) and saved it. Well, it ended up here on the album, here it is.

There was this game called Algo something or other, and I matched some of it’s samples and tracks with a tune and called it Algoshit. This was it. It didn’t make it to the album, but was intended for it. I just ran out of space. This is only one block from that song, the song was actually another tune called “Empire” which I made with my friend Ted Johnson (aka Chase) back in the day. We did all sorts of versions from C64 to Amiga and PC and who knows where else. Ted was one of those dotcom success stories, he ran a trivia site back in the day and then cashed out, woot, wonder what happen to him? I wonder what happen to all those Empire songs we did.. (shrug) ..they were neato. Perhaps one of them was picked up and used as the theme music for the SciFi show “Fringe” if you listen to this short track and some others you may hear the similarities… or not.

Another block of a song that didn’t make it to the album, it was going to be a sort of funky hiphop tune, this was done in Dynamic Drums but wasn’t finished. Silly horn blasts, gah I hate hearing them in songs now. It could make a nice base for your next megahit rap song though, so go ahead and download it 🙂 I know Justin Timberlake or was it Timbaland that likes to use old tracker snippets in their songs of today, funny stuff! Just don’t hate on em, my tunes are Creative Commons which means you can use em, remix em, whatever, as long as I get credit – and if you do something commercial with them, well of course we need to talk 🙂 Sorry, where was I? Uhm, Funky. Dig it!